Everyone thank Liskula Cohen for ruining blogging
Well, maybe not completely ruined it, but setting the precedent for it.
You can read here how this Vogue model sued Google, demanding it turn over information about the anonymous blogger who called her a skank. Let’s go over all the reasons this is bad:
1. Blogs are not published media. While some blogs are businesses, bloggers do not have to have journalistic integrity (at least not beyond something like Glenn Beck calling Obama a racist… that seemed like an opinion, can he be sued too?). Blogs are like public journals for their writers to express whatever they are feeling. No one is sitting there saying you are factually a skank – it is now everyone’s opinion that Liskula Cohen is a skank.
2. America needs to put judges who understand technology (and reality) on major cases like this. From the article:
“Justice Joan Madden rejected the blogger’s claim that the blogs “serve as a modern-day forum for conveying personal opinions, including invective and ranting”, and should not be treated as factual assertions.”
She rejected that blogs are opinions and believes all bloggers write only factual assertions.
Therefore, she believes that bloggers are saying everything they ever feel or think in their blog as fact.
Anyone who has spent 5 minutes on someone’s personal blog site knows what blogs are. I don’t come on here saying my opinion that a certain TV commercial is stupid as fact. It is clearly my opinion. The company who produced the TV commercial shouldn’t have the right to come back at me for libel. This is the precedent that this sets.
3. Now, “skank NYC” will forever be tied to Liskula Cohen. Many more people know about it now, and to be honest after looking at everything with Liskula Cohen, it is MY OPINION AND NOT FACT that the blogger wasn’t really wrong.
4. SOME ANONYMOUS DOUCHE CALLED YOU A SKANK ON A SMALL-TIME BLOG. GET THE FUCK OVER IT.
So according to this, once Cohen got the email address, she immediately knew who it was and phoned her. She says the person is “irrelevant” in her life. Really? Why do you have her phone number? Why did you have to go and ruin blogging for the rest of America just so you could call this person to “forgive” her even though your original intent was to then sue them. It seems I’m not the only person who thinks this, since the comments for all the sites that have this news story up seem to show that other people are dumbfounded that someone actually sued over being called a name on the internet.
I’m not suggesting that bloggers should get to say whatever they want, as the description of Cohen was harsh and was kind of presented factually, so in that case it could totally have been fair to write to Google and ask them to remove that one single blog. Google took it down in March, after they had been sued but long before the ruling. It could have been left there and dropped. However, that really only applies to that blog and what it was exactly stating. Now, all bloggers suffer because the judge doesn’t get the difference that not all blogs are written by wannabe journalists hoping to get a break at their local newspaper.
I’ve said it before when referencing numerous court cases, but this is yet another reason I just have so little faith in this country. I feel like a broken record repeating this over and over, but the fact that this woman was even allowed to sue for this information hurts my brain, much less that she won by a judge who clearly has no idea what she is talking about.
